Multilateral Transparency for Security Markets Through DLT

For decades, changing technology and policy choices have worked to fragment securities markets, rendering them so dark that neither ownership nor real-time price of securities are generally visible to all parties multilaterally. The policies in the U.S. National Market System and the EU Market in Financial Instruments Directive— together with universal adoption of the indirect holding system— have pushed Western securities markets into a corner from which escape to full transparency has seemed either impossible or prohibitively expensive. Although the reader has a right to skepticism given the exaggerated promises surrounding blockchain in recent years, we demonstrate in this paper that distributed ledger technology (DLT) contains the potential to convert fragmented securities markets back to multilateral transparency. Leading markets generally lack transparency in two ways that derive from their basic structure: (1) multiple platforms on which trades in the same security are matched have separate bid/ask queues and are not consolidated in real time (fragmented pricing), and (2) highspeed transfers of securities are enabled by placing ownership of the securities in financial institutions, thus preventing transparent ownership (depository or street name ownership). The distributed nature of DLT allows multiple copies of the same pricing queue to be held simultaneously by a large number of order-matching platforms, curing the problem of fragmented pricing. This same distributed nature of DLT would allow the issuers of securities to be nodes in a DLT network, returning control over securities ownership and transfer to those issuers and thus, restoring transparent ownership through direct holding with the issuer. A serious objection to DLT is that its latency is very high—with each Bitcoin blockchain transaction taking up to ten minutes. To remedy this, we first propose a private network without cumbersome proof-of-work cryptography. Second, we introduce into our model the quickly evolving technology of “lightning networks,” which are advanced two-layer off-chain networks conducting high-speed transacting with only periodic memorialization in the permanent DLT network. Against the background of existing securities trading and settlement, this Article demonstrates that a DLT network could bring multilateral transparency and thus represent the next step in evolution for markets in their current configuration

Income Taxation of Farmer Cooperatives

PDF pages:

Higher levels of process synchronisation

Four new synchronisation primitives (SEMAPHOREs, RESOURCEs, EVENTs and BUCKETs) were introduced in the KRoC 0.8beta release of occam for SPARC (SunOS/Solaris) and Alpha (OSF/1) UNIX workstations [1][2][3]. This paper reports on the rationale, application and implementation of two of these (SEMAPHOREs and EVENTs). Details on the other two may be found on the web [4]. The new primitives are designed to support higher-level mechanisms of SHARING between parallel processes and give us greater powers of expression. They will also let greater levels of concurrency be safely exploited from future parallel architectures, such as those providing (virtual) shared-memory. They demonstrate that occam is neutral in any debate between the merits of message-passing versus shared-memory parallelism, enabling applications to take advantage of whichever paradigm (or mixture of paradigms) is the most appropriate. The new primitives could be (but are not) implemented in terms of traditional channels, but only at the expense of increased complexity and computational overhead. The primitives are immediately useful even for uni-processors - for example, the cost of a fair ALT can be reduced from O(n) to O(1). In fact, all the operations associated with new primitives have constant space and time complexities; and the constants are very low. The KRoC release provides an Abstract Data Type interface to the primitives. However, direct use of such mechanisms still allows the user to misuse them. They must be used in the ways prescribed (in this paper and in [4]) else their semantics become unpredictable. No tool is provided to check correct usage at this level. The intention is to bind those primitives found to be useful into higher level versions of occam. Some of the primitives (e.g. SEMAPHOREs) may never themselves be made visible in the language, but may be used to implement bindings of higher-level paradigms (such as SHARED channels and BLACKBOARDs). The compiler will perform the relevant usage checking on all new language bindings, closing the security loopholes opened by raw use of the primitives. The paper closes by relating this work with the notions of virtual transputers, microcoded schedulers, object orientation and Java threads

Convergence of Euro Area Inflation Rates

We study the behavior of inflation rates among the 12 initial Euro countries in order to test whether and when the group convergence initially dictated by the Maastricht treaty and now by the ECB, occurs. We also assess the impact of events such as the advent of the Euro and the 2008 financial crisis. Due to the small size of the estimation sample, we propose a new procedure that increases the power of panel unit root tests when used to study group-wise convergence. Applying this new procedure to Euro area inflation, we find strong and lasting evidence of convergence among the inflation rates soon after the implementation of the Maastricht treaty and a dramatic decrease in the persistence of the differential after the occurrence of the single currency. After the 2008 crisis, Euro area inflation rates follow the ECB’s price stability benchmark, although Greece reports relatively higher inflation.groupwise convergence, inflation, Euro area, 2008 crisis.

tRNA signatures reveal polyphyletic origins of streamlined SAR11 genomes among the alphaproteobacteria

Phylogenomic analyses are subject to bias from compositional convergence and noise from horizontal gene transfer (HGT). Compositional convergence is a likely cause of controversy regarding phylogeny of the SAR11 group of Alphaproteobacteria that have extremely streamlined, A+T-biased genomes. While careful modeling can reduce artifacts caused by convergence, the most consistent and robust phylogenetic signal in genomes may lie distributed among encoded functional features that govern macromolecular interactions. Here we develop a novel phyloclassification method based on signatures derived from bioinformatically defined tRNA Class-Informative Features (CIFs). tRNA CIFs are enriched for features that underlie tRNA-protein interactions. Using a simple tRNA-CIF-based phyloclassifier, we obtained results consistent with those of bias-corrected whole proteome phylogenomic studies, rejecting monophyly of SAR11 and affiliating most strains with Rhizobiales with strong statistical support. Yet SAR11 and Rickettsiales tRNA genes share distinct patterns of A+T-richness, as expected from their elevated genomic A+T compositions. Using conventional supermatrix methods on total tRNA sequence data, we could recover the artifactual result of a monophyletic SAR11 grouping with Rickettsiales. Thus tRNA CIF-based phyloclassification is more robust to base content convergence than supermatrix phylogenomics on whole tRNA sequences. Also, given the notoriously promiscuous HGT of aminoacyl-tRNA synthetases, tRNA CIF-based phyloclassification may be relatively robust to HGT of network components. We describe how unique features of tRNA-protein interaction networks facilitate the mining of traits governing macromolecular interactions from genomic data, and discuss why interaction-governing traits may be especially useful to solve difficult problems in microbial classification and phylogeny

Traffic scenario generation technique for piloted simulation studies

Piloted simulation studies of cockpit traffic display concepts require the development of representative traffic scenarios. With the exception of specific aircraft interaction issues, most research questions can be addressed using traffic scenarios consisting of prerecorded aircraft movements merged together to form a desired traffic pattern. Prerecorded traffic scenarios have distinct research advantages, allowing control of traffic encounters with repeatability of scenarios between different test subjects. A technique is described for generation of prerecorded jet transport traffic scenarios suitable for use in piloted simulation studies. Individual flight profiles for the aircraft in the scenario are created interactively with a computer program designed specifically for this purpose. The profiles are then time-correlated and merged into a complete scenario. This technique was used to create traffic scenarios for the Denver, Colorado area with operations centered at Stapleton International Airport. Traffic scenarios for other areas may also be created using this technique, with appropriate modifications made to the navigation fix locations contained in the flight profile generation program